We performed a comparison between KVM and VMware VSphere based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: VMware VSphere is the winner in this comparison. It is a powerful solution with good customer support and a proven ROI. It is, however, more expensive.
"Documentation and problem-solving troubleshooting are the most valuable features. Performance (when fine-tuned and with "special" HW) is awesome, equal to or more than other enterprise closed-source solutions."
"It is an easily scalable solution."
"Good screen and keyboard sharing feature."
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"There is a strong emphasis on availability, and they have numerous API interfaces for distributed storage and the solution is quite known for its openness."
"The KVM service is well managed with a central policy interface."
"If you prefer command-line, there are all kinds of command-line options."
"It is easy to use, stable, and flexible. It is a pretty mature product, and it is faster than VirtualBox."
"I like stability and the organization of the different functions into the I#M feature which is also quite useful, quite stable."
"It makes managing your virtual servers easier and more centralized."
"It is a very stable solution. It performs well for our requirements. It has been running for a long time, so we are very knowledgeable about this solution. It is a very well-supported solution, and it is very flexible. The expansion of its functionality is dynamic."
"It is easy to maintain our data machines and take snapshots with the solution."
"vMotion is one of the most useful features, which helps to provide both flexibility and High Availability. With new versions of vSphere and vCenter, it is still improving (e.g., vMotion across vCenter Servers and virtual switches)."
"VMware vSphere has plenty of features."
"Stability and scalability are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The solution is very scalable."
"The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category."
"One thing that maybe could be improved is making it easier to scale. It needs to be more clear on how to scale the storage space for virtual machines."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"I have previously used VMware and KVM is easier to use. However, they both have their strengths depending on their use cases. They are mostly equal. One of VMware's advantages is it has better support."
"The networking with wireless devices needs improvement."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"There are some issues with the graphics and some software that is very complex."
"Technical support could be better. In the next release, I would like to see an improved user interface and dashboard. This type of improvement will make it easy or help our engineers understand the solution from a requirement point of view."
"The only concern that I have with VMware is the support. It is very limited and can be better."
"There could be an inbuilt dashboard for reporting purposes."
"It could be more composable. At present, a fluid pool is not available to us. It would be great to have the flexibility."
"A fully **automatic** and lightweight Virtual Center. Another time this has a huge improvement in last releases. However, a more automatic and simple deployment is required."
"Sometimes you can't find items and you need to log onto different physical servers to do technical tasks. I don't fully understand why this is the case."
"In the last couple of years, the breaking apart of specific added benefits and charging license upcharges for them. That would be the only negative thing that I have to say: As a large consumer of the Hypervisor, we have a hard time justifying the cost of utilizing the extra products, especially when it's a couple of grand here and there, a couple of hundred dollars here and there. It's hard for an IT administrator or an architect to sell to upper management. When they're seeing so much ROI from the Hypervisor, it's hard to show them that there is extra value in the additional products that can be tied on top."
"We are provided with a mini dashboard that has been improved in the latest version but it still could be better. The monitoring is now available on the vCenter dashboard and the vROps has been added to the basic version that had to be purchased separately before. A complete dashboard has always been provided with some competitors, such as Nutanix."
"Monitoring information could always be improved."
KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 39 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. KVM is rated 8.0, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of KVM writes "Delivers good performance because of kernel-based virtualization". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". KVM is most compared with Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox, Hyper-V, VMware Workstation and Oracle VM, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and Nutanix AHV Virtualization. See our KVM vs. VMware vSphere report.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
We monitor all Server Virtualization Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.